Last night, November 20, Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), a work that consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
This is wrong.
It’s beyond wrong. It’s obscene and immoral. It’s the ugliest display of excess I’ve seen in a long time.
I’m not naive. As an editor at an art publication, I recognize the power of spectacle, and I’ve covered several gimmicky, record-shattering auction sales.
But that didn’t stop my blood from boiling as I watched the bidding climb rapidly to about six times the original estimate. I wasn’t expecting it, but I felt sick to my stomach.
The billionaire who bought the banana, crypto investor Justin Sun, may have also felt something in his stomach as he threw out bid after bid. Maybe it was the distant echo of a starving child’s growling stomach.
When it first appeared on the walls of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, “Comedian” was hailed as a brilliant critique of the art market’s grotesque detachment from any economic rhyme or reason, let alone artistic merit. But I don’t think Cattelan’s “prank” was ever in good faith. The Italian artist swims in the same swamp as those he pretends to parody. The murkier the waters, the more they thrive.
It’s only fitting that the mundane banana was bought by a crypto bro who also conjured his fortune out of thin air. But the second the work became a personal investment asset, it lost any shred of irony it might have once possessed. “Comedian” has become worth more than the artworks whose market Cattelan pretended to lampoon by taping up the fruit at an art fair. The snake has eaten its tail. The mask has become the face. The jester has become the king.
